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Ladies Night: T minus three-and-a-half days and counting ...
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"Well, that doesn't leave me much to choose from, now does it?" Pegasus said irritably. "Either of those songs would have been perfect. Now I'm stuck with what – Sex Bomb and Let's Get It On?"
"Be cool. We'll think of something," Roslyn soothed. It was early afternoon, and as the last stragglers shuffled in yawning for the tail-end of breakfast she and Pegasus sat at a table in the dining room working out the details of his Ladies' Night appearence. She was familiar with the music and costumes that Rios and Winchester – the other two men who 'd be stripping – used, and so was trying to find contrasting songs and ideas for Pegasus in order to balance out the show musically and visually.
Kaiba, who stood wedged into his usual out-of-the-way corner near the Bear Rug's entrance with his mug of coffee, enjoyed seeing Pegasus fret. However, he also understood that too much stress might make Pegasus renege his promise to perform, and so every time laughter threatened Kaiba hid it by taking a swallow of coffee.
A red-haired woman whose stage name was Soozee Creamcheese stopped at Roslyn's table and picked up a piece of paper. "Rudy Dinka's dancing too? Awesome!"
"Yes," Roslyn nodded as she paged through her music book. "He's only doing one number, though. As a favor to Rios."
"Woo, I can't wait," Soozee said. "That's delicious 100% prime man-meat with a package that delivers. Rawr!"
Pegasus scowled, and Kaiba could almost hear what was going through his mind: I don't want to be sub-par meat! I want to be worshiped!
Time for another sip of coffee.
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As the dining room emptied and Roslyn and Pegasus' discussion became calmer, a little girl and her mother came in from the hallway that led to the dormitory. Instead of going to the serving pans that had been set up on the bar, the little girl and her mother went right to the mystery cabinet.
Kaiba watched, curious. He couldn't remember seeing the mother around The Bear Rug before – not that he paid much attention to the women either during their numbers or off-duty – but he was certain he hadn't seen the child. She wasn't like the other children, who generally seemed to be noisy, sylishly dressed tiny adults: instead, her dark hair was in a simple long braid, she wore drab, dark plaid clothing, and there was a large book under her arm. Her eyes were barely visible behind thick glasses.
The cabinet opened. The plates of food the girl and her mother took out were different than what had been set out for the others. Cooked to order?
Interesting.
The two looked around the room, finally picking – with obvious reluctance – the booth near the shadowed corner where Kaiba stood. It was, he realized, precisely where he would have sat given the room's seating choices – the booth was enclosed, private, and most importantly set apart from the racuous tables of The Bear Rug's employees.
Their reluctance to sit in the booth likely came from his presence near it.
As he walked past them to get more coffee, he glanced at the cover of the girl's book. For a moment, he thought it was Znosko-Borovsky's book on the middle game, but of course that was ludicrous. It probably was just some battered collection of fairy-tales or girly romance stories.
He refilled his mug and sat at the end of the bar, near Pegasus and Roslyn's table. Across the room, the mother and daughter were now talking intently in their isolated nook.
Pegasus folded his arms and said sulkily, "I don't think I'm really trance person, Miz Roslyn. Nor am I house, or bhangra, or industrial."
Kaiba appreciated the humor of Pegasus denying his own company name, but of course there was no point in outing him as a CEO.
"Just wait til you hear it," Roslyn was saying. "It'll be perfect. And real easy to move to, I promise. C'mon back to my office, I'll play it for you."
"Kaiba," Pegasus asked petulantly as he and Roslyn got up from the table, "back me up on this, won't you?"
"Who's Kaiba?" Roslyn asked.
"Oh," Pegasus floundered, "it's, that's, ah, just another nickname for Kino over there."
"Kaiba, Kino, Ben – you sure have a lot of names for someone who's not on stage," Roslyn said to Kaiba with a grin. "Sure you're not holding out on us?"
"Come along and help me out, please?" Pegasus pleaded.
"I'd prefer to be surprised,' Kaiba said smoothly, denying Pegasus' request with great satisfaction. "Along with the rest of the audience."
"Cruel boy," Pegasus said with a disapproving pout, then followed Roslyn to her office.
Smirking, Kaiba finished off his coffee.
"Is he your friend?"
The little girl was standing by his bar-stool. He glanced over at the booth, but it was now empty.
"No."
"Do you want to play cards?" she asked, climbing onto an adjacent barstool.
"No."
"Can I sit here?"
"No."
She scrunched up her face and narrowed her eyes. The combination of this fierce expression with her thick glasses was comical. "Do you always say no?" she demanded.
Kaiba bit back a chuckle. "No." He knew this game, though he didn't remember if it actually had a name: Make Me Talk, Make Me Lose, something like that. He and Mokuba had played it in the orphanage.
"Let's see ...." She tapped her lips in an obvious imitation of an adult in deep thought. "I could get you some more coffee. You like coffee, right?" Her grin was wicked: she was sure she had him.
He nodded.
"Ha! I got you to say something besides no!"
He raised an eyebrow, questioning this.
"Oh!" she looked crestfallen. "You're right. You didn't say it, you ... nodded your head it. That doesn't count."
He pantomined drinking and she brightened. "Okay, coming right up!" She slid off the chair, ran over to the mystery cabinet and knocked. A minute or two later she came back carrying a blue mug.
"Wow, that cup is hot!" she said with melodramatic emphasis as she handed it to him. "I thought my hands would burn off!"
He set the mug down, and then made a show of examing the palms of her hands. They weren't the slightest bit red, but he decided he might as well toss her an easy victory. "I think you'll live," he said dryly.
She beamed. "Ha ha! You talked! I win!"
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Ladies' Night T minus two-and-a-half days
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The next day Kaiba sat in the isolated booth near the front door where he now spent almost every moment of his waking hours. It was late afternoon, two hours until The Bear Rug opened for business and so he had the dining room all to himself, although echoes and faint laughter came from the club room where Pegasus was "practicing" with two of the women dancers.
Kaiba attempted to find something, anything of interest in the three-week old local newspaper that someone had left behind the previous night, hoping that it might relieve the mind-numbing boredom. He'd never admit it to Pegasus, of course, but the tedium of waiting around in case he was needed was more difficult to bear than anything he'd done in the past ten days had been.
Evenings were the worst, when all around him was activity: strangers eating and drinking, Pegasus laughing and joking behind the bar, Roslyn moving between dining room and club making sure her customers were satisfied, the music and cheers cascading in from the other room while a dancer was performing. He hated that he so quickly became secretly eager for the moments when Roslyn beckoned him over to take orders and bus tables for fifteen minutes or a half-hour while whoever the regular server was took a break, but he at least understood why: at least then he was moving, doing something.
Four more days. He turned the pages, eyes flicking over articles on energy costs and tourism, school district levies, immunizations and logging, police reports and fishing derbies, boat sales, acne treatments and ovarian cancer, managing credit card debt, remodelling a bathroom ... Movie reviews, ads for concrete, milling, and welding services, and a crossword puzzle filled the last few pages before the classifieds.
Perhaps he should get a pen.
There was a soft scuffling sound; when he looked up from the newspaper he saw that the little girl with glasses had come into the dining room. She spotted him and walked over.
"Mister Paris has pretty hair," she said without preamble as she slid into the booth's other seat. "Are you his friend?"
"What do you think?" He didn't see what hair had to do with friendship, but then girls and women rarely made any sense.
"You're not his friend."
"Why not?"
"Friends are supposed to help each other. You aren't helping him with dancing."
Kaiba was considering how to respond to this when there was a clatter of high heels, and the girl's mother appeared in the hallway from the dormitory. "Tessa!" she chided. "I've been looking all over for you. Why are't you in day care with Miss Jenny?"
"Mom, it's boring." The girl – Tessa said, turned around and hung out of the booth with an exaggerated sigh. "All we're doing is coloring with crayons. Babies do that."
"Well, don't interrupt Mister Ben."
"She's not interrupting anything," Kaiba said with a shrug.
"Well ... if you're sure she's no bother." Tessa's mother said uncertainly. "Send her away the instant she annoys you." She coughed delicately and then went back down the hallway.
"Thanks for letting me stay," Tessa said. "Those little kids are so boring."
Kaiba contemplated Tessa. "How old are you?"
"Almost seven. But I read big books."
"Oh?"
"Right now I'm reading Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. It's by Julie Verne. There's a submarine. I'm not done with it yet. I bet there'll be a kraken by the end."
Kaiba didn't remember what he'd been reading at that age, before his father died. A time of his life that had long been a memoryless haze. "You can really understand such a book?" he asked. "It's advanced vocabulary."
Tessa made a face. "Some words are tough. My dictionary in the old house got burned. Miss Roslyn doesn't have one."
"There's not need for it in her business."
"Well, I need it," Tessa said, with a haughty delivery that was somehow familiar (though he couldn't identify who it reminded him of).
"If there's a word you don't know," Kaiba said, "write it down to show to me, and I'll tell you the definition." Nostalgia was making him generous: Mokuba had been like this at this age, energetic, impulsive, curious.
"Really?" Her eyes, even behind the thick glasses, were huge. "I'll go to my room and get it now!" She hopped out of the booth, and then stopped. "Oh, wait. I can't."
"Why not?"
"If I go back Miss Jenny will see me and make me stay in day care with the babies."
"I see. Well, if nothing can be done ... "
"We could play cards!" Tessa scrambled back into the booth. "I have a deck. Do you know how to play Skirmish?"
"No."
"I made it up to play with my mom. It's like War, but faster. You leave the cards in the middle. The loser picks first. The winner keeps both cards from the skirmish. If there's a tie you both take another card. When the pile is gone you count your cards, and whoever has the most wins."
"Simple enough."
Tessa dug in the pocket of her sweater. The dogeared, worn pile of cards she put in the center of the table had brown backs with a black oval in the center.
Duel Monsters cards.
"You go first," she said, kneeling on her bench and huddling over the table on her elbows, one hand hovering over the pile. "I have to warn you, I'm really lucky."
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Ladies' Night T minus one-and-a-half days
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"Mystic Horseman beats Witch," Kaiba said. "Your draw, loser."
Tessa shrugged. "I'm still ahead." She turned over Rogue Doll (1600).
"How do you know?" he asked, annoyingly relieved when his draw was Twin-Headed Fire Dragon (2200). He swept the two cards into his pile.
Kick Man (1300) was Tessa's next card. "I've been counting," she said.
"Is that so?" His loss with Decayed Commander (1000) was followed by the draw of an even weaker card, Hoshiningen (500).
Tessa crowed, "You're losing so bad," and flipped over Red Archery Girl (1400) to win yet another skirmish.
"She's almost as cruel as you are," he said. His next card was Kagemusha of the Blue Flame (800). Tessa defeated it with Witty Phantom (1400). "Another old nemesis," he muttered.
"I can't help what cards are in my box," she said with a shrug, "After I take the green and purple ones out."
"You used a purple one before," he said. "Empress Judge." He assumed that Tessa had never played Duel Monsters properly, although he was sure she was intelligent ebough to grasp the concept of a Fusion Monster.
"Well, duh," Tessa said. "The Empress has red hair. She has to play."
Roslyn, who had been absent most of the afternoon, came into the dining room and over to their booth. "Tessa, your mom and I are going into Solly to do some shopping. Can you check with Ironhewn to see if he needs anything while we're there?"
"Sure thing." Tessa hopped down from the bench and then shook her finger sternly at Kaiba. "Don't rearrange the cards while I'm gone!"
"Hn."
As Tessa hurried over the the mystery cabinet, Roslyn said, "She's sure taken a liking to you. Do you have kids of your own?"
Kaiba almost laughed, until he realized that it was meant as a serious question; he supposed it deserved a serious answer. "No. But I raised my brother from the time I was eight."
"Oh, so that's how you understand how to deal with kids."
"They don't bullshit like adults do," Kaiba said before he could censor himself, but Roslyn didn't seem to be offended at being lumped into the category of the bullshitters.
"True," she said, glancing over at Tessa, who had knocked on the cabinet and was now looking inside it. "Can I ask a favor? Keep an eye on Tessa until we get back?"
"I can do that," Kaiba said. "I have nothing else to do at the moment."
Tessa came back. "He didn't answer me, and there wasn't any note in the cabinet, so I guess he doesn't need anything."
"Alright then. Thank you for checking, Tessa," Rosyln said. "Listen, do you mind hanging out with Ben til your mom and I get back from Solly?"
"Okay." Tessa clambered back onto the bench. "I'll make sure he doesn't get into any trouble."
"That's my girl," Roslyn said, and hurried away.
Tessa crossed her arms on the table and rested her chin on them. "Your pick." She sighed dramatically. "Why do grownups lie?"
"Who's lying?" He drew Flame Champion (1900) from the pile.
Tessa turned over Ancient Elf (1400). "Roslyn said that she and my mom are going shopping, but my mom hates shopping."
"What else would they be doing?" Kaiba asked, intrigued by Tessa's declaration.
Tessa shrugged, then turned over Mystical Shine Ball (500). "I'm bored with playing cards. Do you want to go see if my friend's home?"
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Kaiba had expected to be taken back to the daycare area in the dormitory, but instead Tessa stopped halfway down the hallway to the dorm and knocked on a battered metal door. "It's me," she said. "I brought my friend."
There was a metallic rattling, the door handle turned, and then the door swung open a hand's-breadth to show a slice of The Bear Rug's dimly-lit kitchen.
They entered. The room was surprisingly big, at least as large as the dining room. The equipment looked old, but everything was clean, the metal counters and the dozens of pans hanging from ceiling hooks glowing with soft silvery patina. At the back of the room a single fluorescent light shone down on a man.
He was old, short, solidly built, dressed in a spotless white chef's coat. Gray-white hair was pulled into a tight topknot, and a bushy Fu Manchu style mustache extended below his chin. He was not Caucasian, but Kaiba couldn't place his ethnicity – Chinese, perhaps, or Alaska native?
One thing was certain – the dark brown eyes watched Kaiba with hostile distrust.
Tessa walked up to him and waved. "Hi, Ironhewn. This is my new friend who plays Skirmish with me. His name is Kinotsumaru, but everyone calls him Ben." She was gesturing as she spoke, and when she began to make rapid, complex hand motions Kaiba realized that she was using sign language.
Ironhewn looked down at Tessa, then made a grimace of disgust and a curt, pushing-away gesture..
"I don't need you to interpret. He doesn't want me here," Kaiba said sourly.
"Don't worry, he's just shy," Tessa said. She and Ironhewn continued to sign emphatically, but without spoken translation. After several minutes Tessa stamped her foot, crossed her arms, and said, "You're really making me mad!"
Ironhewn folded his arms as well. Conversation over.
"Can I at least show him how the cabinet works?" Tessa pleaded.
Ironhewn looked away from Tessa, up at the corner of the ceiling in the back of the kitchen. After a moment he pantomimed knocking on a door.
"Thank you!" Tessa signed, then took Kaiba's hand and led him over to the front of the kitchen, which shared a wall with the dining room.
The only part of the "mystery cabinet" that had been visible in the dining room was the door set flush in the dining room wall, but inside the kitchen the "back door" and sides could be seen. A gear-and spring assembly connected the hinges of both doors, ensuring that if one door was opened the other would be held tightly shut.
"Simple yet effective," Kaiba said. "An elegant solution, though I don't see why such precautions are necessary."
"And look," Tessa said, squatting and pointing to small pads on the undersides of the cabinet's shelves, "those things know when people take the plates off the shelves. So Ironhewn knows when to put more food in."
Kaiba, tracing the nearly-invisible wires from the pads to a tiny row of lights at the top of the cabinet, nodded. "Piezoelectric sensors. Very ingenious."
Tessa turned around and seemed to be signing Kaiba's comments to Ironhewn, but he pretend not to see her.
"Well, we might as well go," Tessa said. "He's being really mean today. Do you want to go play some Skirmish?"
As the two of them moved toward the kitchen door Ironhewn snapped his fingers to get Tessa's attention, and then, folding down his three middle fingers so that only his thumb and pinky were extended, made a back and forth scrubbing motion in the air between himself and Kaiba.
"Really?" Tessa signed, but Ironhewn had turned his back.
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Troop Dragon (700). What crap. "If he's deaf, how does he know you're knocking?" More piezoelectric sensors, he supposed.
Lizard Soldier (1100) "Oh, he can hear." Tessa picked up both cards and spent several seconds elaborately straightening the stack of cards she'd won – almost every skirmish so far.
Kaiba drew Red-Eyes B. Chick (800) and made a face. "He's not deaf? Then why do you use sign language? Is he unable to speak?"
Skilled Dark Magician (1900) flattened the Chick. "Oh he can talk. He just doesn't want to."
Four-Stared Ladybug of Doom (800) – what was with all the small fry cards he kept drawing? "That's ridiculous," he said. "It's eccentricity for eccentricity's sake." He glanced at the archway into the club room, where Pegasus and "his girls" were still "practicing" for tomorrow night's show.
"My mom says maybe he got messed up in a war. Hey look – war!" Tessa had just drawn Beast of Talwar (2400). "Mom says sometimes when soldiers get messed up they don't ever get okay."
"Is that what happened? Ironhewn was a soldier?" He thought briefly of Amelda, and was slightly startled to draw Total Defense Shogun (1550).
"No, he just doesn't like people," Tessa said, gloating when her card was Chaos Command Magician (2400). "He only lets me and Miss Roslyn in his kitchen."
"I see." Kaiser Glider (2400). Finally, something to break the losing streak! "At the end, that last sign he made – what did that mean?"
"Oh you mean this?" Tessa made the back and forth scrubbing motion, then drew The End of Anubis (2500). "That meant that he thinks that you and him are the same."
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